Books/Writing
Cabbagehead
Cabbagehead is the story of one man’s friendship with a large, wise, philosophical weed. Fifty-year-old Bradley Peterson is happiest when alone gardening. His beautiful, domineering wife, Calley, runs things; his grown children barely know him. While his wife is away, Bradley finds a cabbage-like plant that speaks to him. Their conversations help Bradley discover his long-suppressed self.
EXCERPT
He thought again of Cabbagehead’s phrase, “Be Bradley.” It was beginning to sound trite— just like every bit of clichéd advice he’d ever heard: “Get a grip. . . go with the flow. . . walk it off. . . lighten up. . . live in the moment. . . stop looking into mirrors and start looking out windows. . .”
He paused over that last one and tried to figure out if it applied in any way to him. He hadn’t been looking into mirrors; he had been peering down cellar stairs. Perhaps someone should write an advice book and expound on a different trite phrase in each chapter, proving they were all good pieces of advice, even though some were contradictory—if you had a grip, wouldn’t that prevent you from going with the flow? Perhaps they weren’t meant to be taken quite so literally. Perhaps they meant nothing at all.
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Broken Down
My current work in progress is about tall, redheaded, Alabama-born, Professor Margaret Wynn, who was persuaded by her mentor and lover, John, to attend an African Studies symposium in West Africa. But just prior to its start, he tells her their relationship is over and he won’t be attending. Devastated but determined, Margaret goes without him. Soon she is deserted again this time by the side of a road in remote Africa after the conference bus leaves without her.
Tall, redheaded, Alabama-born, Professor Margaret Wynn, was persuaded by her mentor and lover, John, to attend an African Studies symposium in West Africa. But just prior to its start, he tells her their relationship is over and he won’t be attending. Devastated but determined, Margaret goes without him. Soon she is deserted again this time by the side of a road in remote Africa after the conference bus leaves without her.
EXCERPT
It wasn’t just that it was hot on the bus. The bus was heat itself. A wet, choking, difficult-to-inhale evil entity that Margaret envisioned as a very large, red brick laying across her chest. When the bus broke down for the third time, the air conditioner that had once lazily stirred the air also died. The window at Margaret’s seat refused to open beyond a gap of two inches and when she put her face to it searching for a breeze, she felt only a wall of the same heat and no movement of air.
In truth, Margaret mused, she and her fellow travelers knew West Africa and should have anticipated as much. They should have expected that a tire would blow before they left the capital’s perimeter, predicted that the spare would be wrapped by a chain and secured with a padlock for which there was no key, counted on the brakes going bad and the fan belt tearing, and foretold their drinking water and Cokes would be warm. They were, after all, Africanists—historians, anthropologists, linguists, musicologists, political scientists, experts in African Studies, and more, all claiming to know and understand an unknowable, perplexing continent—on a three-hundred-mile journey to the tiny upcountry town, far away and green and wet, where the origin of the people they studied was said to be, to attend a conference where they would deliver their forced, marginal papers; listen to others’ papers with only a modicum of interest; drink alcohol freely; listen to African drumming; take many photos; wear African garb; and hug and high-five their African compatriots, convinced they were one with them.
Now they sat and waited, once again, for rescue.
BROKEN DOWN